Why Leaders Should Not Let Their People Become Too Comfortable

Manchester United is just the latest sports team to dismiss a coach for poor results. (Photograph: Getty)

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Nobody could accuse Nathan Jamail of pulling his punches. An author, speaker and consultant who has also built up businesses in a variety of sectors, Jamail says: "Nobody wants to be seen as a middle manager." And yet, as he points out, "Almost everyone is a leader in the middle." If you lead people and answer to someone else - whether a boss, shareholders or customers - you are among the millions of leaders in the middle. It goes without saying, then, that - thankless as it may appear to be - the task is crucial. It also appears to be little understood.

In his recently-published book, Serve Up, Coach Down: Mastering the Middle and Both Sides of Leadership Best, Jamail seeks to deal with this problem by offering a straightforward description of what he feels the role of the middle manager to be. Admitting that he is going against everything he and many others have been taught, he challenges the popular interpretation of "servant leadership". In adopting the idea of serving their teams, many middle managers have found themselves protecting those they manage from the bosses when in fact they should be helping them to perform better. This would make the middle managers themselves better able to present the sort of performance the bosses are looking for - and so answer the puzzle of why, despite so much effort going into training and development, organizations continue to fail their customers, and ultimately themselves. “Leaders in the middle too often serve down to their people and defend up to their bosses, instead of serving up to their bosses and coaching down to their employees,” Jamail explains.

He expanded on the theory in a recent interview, saying: "The way you serve your people is to make them better." He added that the job of a leader in the middle was to make their boss look good - and the way to do that was to deliver high performance. Likening typical middle managers to parents who say they want the best for their children but are so anxious to give them a better life than they enjoyed that they are overly protective, he says managers need to realize that - just like teachers and sports coaches - their job is to bring out the best in them. And that may involve doing things that make them look like they are being hard on their charges, but it is all done in the name of wanting them to become better at what they do.

Doing this effectively requires telling employees from the start what is expected of them and then measuring performance against those expectations. It also involves abandoning another popular management mantra - "I hire good people and let them get on with it". In the words of Jamail, "that is not good. You should be coaching them to be the best."

Similar arguments are made by Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth in their forthcoming book, The Coaching Effect. Eckstrom and Wirth, respectively founder and vice-president of EcSell Institute, which advises organizations on how coaching can help drive performance, argue that a big part of the problem is management itself. Management is about process and order, which do not create growth. On the other hand, coaching develops and inspires people to do their best work - and it is that that leads to better performance.

But, just as in sports, not all coaches are equally effective. Based on extensive study on "coaching interactions" and the views of thousands of employees and managers, Eckstrom and Wirth believe they have identified what distinguishes "high-growth coaches" from their less effective peers. For a start, the high-growth coaches tend to have four particular methods of motivating teams.

One-to-One Meetings. Proactive, consistent one-to-one meetings are necessary to generate trust, communication, and accountability with team members. When coaches take the time to connect with team members individually they get to know them better and are able to have strategic conversations about how they can do their jobs more effectively.

Team Meetings. Team meetings offer an opportunity for building camaraderie, communication and education. These meetings can also be turned into powerful learning sessions.

Performance Feedback. Good feedback helps those receiving it improve their skills, achieve their performance goals and avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Career Development. Coaches must make career development a priority by engaging in discussions with their team members and identifying opportunities for growth.

When these actions are present performance improves. In other words, it is the "coaching effect" that creates the greater discretionary effort upon which successful organizations are built. But key to the whole concept is the discovery by Eckstrom and Wirth that exponential growth in any aspect of work or life can only be achieved if there is an element of discomfort. The idea that comfort is the enemy of success has struck such a chord that a TEDxTalk in which Eckstrom expanded on the concept through the "growth rings" - stagnation, chaos, order and complexity - has been viewed by more than 2 million people.

In an interview earlier this week, Eckstrom acknowledged that discomfort needed to be handled carefully. He stressed that creating what he calls "healthy discomfort" did not necessarily mean that the work environment had to be toxic. Indeed, that would be counterproductive. As he says, it is possible to create short-term growth out of fear. But over time that is unlikely to be sustainable. On the other hand, encouraging people to stretch themselves, to leave what these days is called their "comfort zone", creates impressive results, provided the environment is supportive and that people know what is going on.

The obvious example of this is sports teams, which Eckstrom says are generally way ahead of business in seeing the potential of coaching. Of course, sports results are there for everybody to see. But it is up to those leading businesses to see that it is not enough to talk about their people being their biggest asset and then do little to develop that asset. Employees in businesses - and their managers - should be made more accountable for their performance, as recent events at the English football club Manchester United indicate happens in sports. One of the factors seen as decisive in the departure of Jose Mourinho was his apparent inability to bring out the best in players, whereas rivals, such as Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, have gained credit for improving players.

In his interview, Eckstrom described how many of the leaders he and his colleagues talk to about improving performance through coaching experience "almost an epiphany" when asked the simple question, Do you believe the performance of the team is a reflection of how well the team is coached? The vast majority answer Yes. But when asked what their coaches are doing to maximise that they cannot answer.

On the other hand, Eckstrom asserts that organizations where people are held accountable for activities and behaviors that drive performance are much more likely to be successful. But he does not pretend that getting there is not hard work. In other words, organizations - and not just people - have to be prepared to experience some discomfort.

I am a journalist with a special interest in all aspects of management, but especially leadership.